One of my
favorite science writers, Kathryn Schulz, published a take-down of Thoreau in
The New Yorker. Funny title: "Pond Scum." It's smart and entertaining but also, I think, an unfortunate example of willful misreading that gets Thoreau wrong in pretty much every way. When
The New Republic asked if I cared to respond,
I did. An excerpt:
Perhaps the most curiously contrary charge Schulz levels against Thoreau is incuriosity. Provincial, yes—in his travels. In his reading, he was cosmopolitan. But incurious?
The man was endlessly investigating phenomena both natural and human.
On his provincial travels in Concord but also to Cape Cod and Maine, he
was endlessly interviewing strangers—lumberjacks, oystermen, farmers. He romanticized Native Americans as noble savages, and exoticized them, representing the broken English of those he met phonetically in ways that now make us cringe,
but unlike most of his contemporaries, he also made a point of meeting
them, interviewing them, traveling with them, and he tried to learn of
and from them on his long walks.
The data he collected at Walden pond is still used by climate scientists, and he sent some 900 different plant specimens
he’d collected, as well as animals, to the Swiss-born Harvard biologist
Louis Agassiz. My own favorite biographical vignette about Thoreau is
this one, from an essay by Guy Davenport:
The Thoreau who befriended Agassiz, Davenport writes, “was a scientist,
the pioneer ecologist, one of the few men in America with whom
[Agassiz] could talk, as on an occasion when the two went exhaustively
into the mating of turtles, to the dismay of their host for dinner,
Emerson.”
Curiosity is what drew Thoreau to the shipwreck he writes about in Cape Cod,
Exhibit A in Schulz’s indictment. Death was yet another phenomenon he
sought to understand by studying it up close. Quoting one passage out of
the many paragraphs Thoreau devotes to the seaside carnage he
witnessed, Schulz pegs him as a heartless bastard, a sort of
Transcendental sociopath, indifferent to suffering. “On the whole,” that
passage begins, “it was not so impressive a scene as I might have
expected. If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely
place, it would have affected me more.” He’s describing here a paradox
that we’ve all surely experienced: when the sufferings of strangers
multiply, they have a way of growing abstract in our imaginations, as do
the feelings they elicit, hence the numbed indifference casualty
statistics can induce, whereas the suffering of a single individual can
move us easily to outrage or tears. We saw this paradox illustrated last
September by a photo of another drowned refugee who died seeking
sanctuary, Syrian rather than Irish this time, a three-year-old, Aylan
Kurdi, on the Greek island of Kos rather than on Cape Cod.
To turn her one incriminating passage into evidence of Thoreau’s misanthropy, moreover, Schulz has to ignore the rest of the chapter, originally published as an essay in Putnam’s.
It is a kind of extended prose elegy, written to bear witness to and
make sense of the tragedy that befell that shipload of Irish immigrants.
Upon arriving at the beach, Thoreau memorializes the dead, and
individualizes them, and makes us see them in prose as graphic, almost,
as a photograph but more eloquent:
I saw many marble
feet and matted heads as the cloths were raised, and one livid, swollen,
and mangled body of a drowned girl,—who probably had intended to go out
to service in some American family,—to which some rags still adhered,
with a string, half concealed by the flesh, about its swollen neck; the
coiled-up wreck of a human hulk, gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that
the bone and muscle were exposed, but quite bloodless,—merely red and
white,—with wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, dead-lights; or
like the cabin windows of a stranded vessel, filled with sand.
The
essay is almost the inverse of what Schultz takes it for: not a symptom
of cold indifference, an antidote to it. The stoicism of the passage
she quotes is also explained by what follows it, a homily on the
consolations of the afterlife. “All their plans and hopes burst like a
bubble! Infants by the score dashed on the rocks by the enraged Atlantic
Ocean!” Thoreau exclaims, and then reassures his readers—and, one
senses, himself—that the souls of the drowned have reached the safe
harbor of heaven.
It’s here, at such moments, that my own
objections to Thoreau tend to arise. When he goes sauntering to the holy
land, I have trouble following him there. For all his irreverence
toward the church, for all his open-minded, influence-seeking study of
eastern and western philosophy, he is a profoundly Christian writer, and
one whose faith is, on the page at least, less conflicted than
Dickinson’s or Melville’s.
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